Digital Adoption solutions emerged as key enabler for the 'New Normal' of work

Soma Tah

Studies indicate that most of the enterprise software issues are not system-related. Instead, they are mostly related to the design, users, or processes. Businesses end up wasting their time and resource in answering support tickets and prolonging employee training, when the users cannot use the software properly. 

Given the current scenario of remote working, which left no option for business apart from accelerating their digital transformation journeys, Khadim Batti, CEO and co-founder of digital adoption platform, Whatfix tells why digital adoption is crucial for the success of any digital transformation project and how the SaaS-based startup’s solutions are helping companies remotely train their employees on new software and processes.

How crucial is the digital adoption factor for the success of any digital transformation project? 

Digital adoption is very key for the success of any digital transformation project. Businesses spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year in digital transformation projects and digital adoption is a key enabler for them. Otherwise those projects would not see the light of day or the ROI would not be achieved for CIOs, or for the functional or business unit leaders. One of the key reasons why digital transformation projects typically take a lot of time to pick up or do not pick up at all in 50-60% cases is that the change management was not handled properly and the adoption was not optimal for all the processes which are digitized.

How did you come up with the idea of building a digital adoption product? How big is the market altogether?

When we started, we faced a problem ourselves because when we were building our first product, we had around 80-100 customers using it and adoption was a major challenge in ensuring the product get utilized.  So, that made us come up with a product like Whatfix. But as we evolved, we realized several other problem statements also. For example, CRMs are typically built considering the people in leadership positions or the managers, because they want to see the reports, pipeline and forecasting. But to do that effectively, the sales executives or sales reps have to fill up all the information regularly in the right manner and that is where the challenge comes because the CRMs are built for the managers but it is supposed to be utilized by the reps. If those reps do not fill up the information in the right way, the whole ROI and the productivity benefits of that application can go down drastically. 

When we started getting into the nitty-gritties further, the digital adoption market stood out to be pretty huge. It is poised to be a $8-10 million industry in itself, which can help make digital transformation and change management much easier by making training and learning contextual and so on.

How Digital Adoption Platform solutions can help businesses in their digital journeys and how these solutions can maximize the ROI on any digital transformation project?

Enterprise softwares such as ERP, CRM, HCM, SCM, etc. generally are large suites of integrated applications customized to suit unique business requirements, which create a different kind of adoption challenges for the users. So, whenever businesses deploy those softwares, they can deploy Whatfix on top of it to address the adoption challenges with the guided walkthroughs, self-help support, training, etc.

Some of the ROI metrics what we have observed are that the support queries typically comes down by 30%-50%, and the data quality in CRM or SCM typically improves by 20%.  So, if CRM data quality improves by 20%, the predictability and forecast capability go up further. We have seen around 20-25%  improvement in the productivity and efficiency of people in terms of how they use the application as well. When the content (video or knowledge-based article) that trainers or the enablement specialists create are supported by a similar in-app guidance from Whatfix, the content creation/training time gets reduced by 60%- often from a few hours it gets reduced to a few minutes for every content. Whatfix content can be easily integrated with the learning management system (LMS) of the organizations and the entire engagement can be tracked in analytics for further modifications as well.

How digital adoption solution are helping organizations in the current scenario of remote work?

Reliance on software and digital tools have increased significantly amidst this pandemic crisis, as  most of the organizations are letting the people to work from home. Digital adoption solutions have become a key enabler in such scenarios. In a normal scenario, when a software gets deployed, organizations train their employees on how to use them. In a typical organization setup, majority of the people also reach out to their colleagues for help, if they are stuck somewhere. But now it is not possible for them to tap the colleague’s shoulder and ask for help.  Now self-help features of the digital adoption platforms can be extremely helpful for any user  working from home. That is an inflection point for us. We have seen almost 20% jump in the user requests during the COVID-19 crisis.